The last time TC Lin (林道明) tried to organize a photography walk around Zhongzheng District’s (中正) dilapidated Nanjichang (南機場) neighborhood, it snowed in Taipei.
A street and documentary photography instructor at Zhongzheng Community College, Lin is hoping for better weather tomorrow as he attempts to gather photographers — amateurs and professionals alike — to capture everyday life in this 52-year-old community of about 2,000 households before it disappears to the city’s urban renewal plan.
Once a “model community,” the neighborhood has deteriorated over the years and is now largely occupied by elderly living alone or low-income families. The renewal project has been in talks for many years, but progress has stalled due to a number of problems including resident eligibility and the debate on whether to keep the community’s elementary school.
Photo courtesy of TC Lin
“I talked to the borough warden and he wants to leave a recording of the people, objects and life in the community,” Lin says. “He invited photography students before, but they only took pretty pictures such as flowers and sunsets.”
That’s where Lin’s expertise comes in. He named the event “international photo walk” because he wants to encourage foreign photographers to join in.
“I think it would be interesting to include their point of view in this documentation of the community,” he says. “Their angle and style are often different from Taiwanese.”
The borough warden will give a presentation on the community and take the photographers on a tour — including places that are not usually accessible to the public. Lin says he will provide translation and answer questions for those who don’t understand Chinese, though he hopes that there are more bilingual people on the scene to assist him.
Participants don’t need to be too self-conscious about intruding, as the borough warden has notified residents of the photography tour.
However, Lin says the number one key to documentary photography is respecting the subjects.
“You want to record the people and place because you like them and you respect them,” he says. “What mentality you use to photograph your subject is important because he or she will feel it too.”
Lin hopes to turn the results into an exhibition, set tentatively for late March or early April. He also wants to host a forum with exchanges between local and foreign photographers.
One of the most important gripes that Taiwanese have about the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is that it has failed to deliver concretely on higher wages, housing prices and other bread-and-butter issues. The parallel complaint is that the DPP cares only about glamor issues, such as removing markers of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) colonialism by renaming them, or what the KMT codes as “de-Sinification.” Once again, as a critical election looms, the DPP is presenting evidence for that charge. The KMT was quick to jump on the recent proposal of the Ministry of the Interior (MOI) to rename roads that symbolize
On the evening of June 1, Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) apologized and resigned in disgrace. His crime was instructing his driver to use a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon. The Control Yuan is the government branch that investigates, audits and impeaches government officials for, among other things, misuse of government funds, so his misuse of a government vehicle was highly inappropriate. If this story were told to anyone living in the golden era of swaggering gangsters, flashy nouveau riche businessmen, and corrupt “black gold” politics of the 1980s and 1990s, they would have laughed.
It was just before 6am on a sunny November morning and I could hardly contain my excitement as I arrived at the wharf where I would catch the boat to one of Penghu’s most difficult-to-access islands, a trip that had been on my list for nearly a decade. Little did I know, my dream would soon be crushed. Unsure about which boat was heading to Huayu (花嶼), I found someone who appeared to be a local and asked if this was the right place to wait. “Oh, the boat to Huayu’s been canceled today,” she told me. I couldn’t believe my ears. Surely,
When Lisa, 20, laces into her ultra-high heels for her shift at a strip club in Ukraine’s Kharkiv, she knows that aside from dancing, she will have to comfort traumatized soldiers. Since Russia’s 2022 invasion, exhausted troops are the main clientele of the Flash Dancers club in the center of the northeastern city, just 20 kilometers from Russian forces. For some customers, it provides an “escape” from the war, said Valerya Zavatska — a 25-year-old law graduate who runs the club with her mother, an ex-dancer. But many are not there just for the show. They “want to talk about what hurts,” she
RSS